Pera's desktop wallet beta ships as a zip, with a warning not to hold much in it

Pera has opened a beta of a wallet extension that lets a desktop browser sign Algorand transactions by itself, with no phone and no QR code to scan. Pera announced it on October 5 in a blog post, and the r/algorand forum carried the link that afternoon. The blog called the beta open; the portal at beta.perawallet.app¹ calls it a closed beta and holds each registration for an administrator's approval.

The portal is also more careful than the announcement. 'This extension is pre-release software intended for testing and feedback purposes only,' its dashboard reads. 'You may encounter bugs, crashes, or unexpected behavior. Do not use this extension with accounts holding significant funds.' That sits awkwardly beside the claim, in the same launch, that the extension 'has feature parity across core functions with the Pera mobile app.²' Parity describes what the extension can do; the warning describes what it might cost.

Registering, approval, and a zip file

Signing up asks for a username and an email address, and the page then reports the registration as pending approval, with the testing checklist locked until an administrator acts. Once approved, the install itself is a zip file: the portal's link reads 'Download Extension (b454)' and serves the build from Pera's own domain. The Chrome Web Store has no extension listing for Pera.

The extension is 'Powered by Rocca Wallet', according to the portal. Rocca is described in an Algorand Foundation blog post as a white-label wallet framework that handles key storage, identity and passkeys. Pera Wallet 7.0 is a full rebuild of Pera on that infrastructure. A browser extension built on that base was not a surprise: Pera's August recap had already listed a 'Web extension wallet' among what was next.

What changes on the sites that connect to it

The change most people will meet first lives in Pera's Connect software, not in the extension. Release 1.7.0, published on October 8, put the extension 'on by default': when it is installed, a site's connect window lists it first and preselects it. Pera went public with that a day later, in a post titled 'Pera Is Now in Your Browser³'.

The mechanism is simpler than the phone handoff it replaces. The extension places a small interface into every secure page before the page's own code runs, so a site can ask it for an address and a signature directly. According to Pera's release notes, the SDK reached the extension through ARC-27 until this release, an interface standard whose stated job is exactly that exchange.

Signing got stricter as well. The SDK now checks that the wallet returned one signed transaction per slot, in group order, each matching the transaction that was asked for. A short or mismatched answer used to be passed along and now fails. Pera says apps that group several transactions together can ask for one approval instead of one per transaction. Pera says the connect package also shrank to 0.74⁴ MB, from 30.9⁵ MB in the betas, which had shipped a stray file by mistake.

The extension standard Pera left behind

Pera's first route to the extension was brief. According to the 1.6.0 release notes, dated July 30, ARC-27 support arrived behind an experimental flag that defaulted to off. Pera says release 1.7.0, dated October 8, replaced that path with its own, so the extension now connects 'through its own Pera provider instead⁶'. By the release notes' own dates, seventy days separate the two.

ARC-27 is a Final Standards Track interface, published on December 24, 2023 and authored by Kieran O'Neill, that defines the messages a client such as a site and a provider such as a wallet exchange. The Foundation's adoption file for it, last reviewed on April 9, 2026, appears to record no wallets, explorers, tooling, infrastructure or apps, and rates its readiness 'low'. For a builder the reading is narrow: the documented route to the extension is the provider inside Pera Connect, while the standard's own adoption file shows nothing taking it up. ARC-27 remains published; moving off it was Pera's choice.

Desktop Algorand wallets were already here

Pera is not first to put Algorand in a browser. AlgoSigner, the extension the Algorand Foundation supported, ended support on March 31, 2023 and was to be unpublished from the Chrome Store, leaving it neither updated nor supported.⁷ Defly's account announced 'Defly Web is public' as a Chrome extension on August 22, 2024. According to an xGov proposal its builder filed in February 2026, Lute's browser extension had 2,032⁸ users, with work running since January 2024. A reader who wants desktop signing today therefore has alternatives that carry no beta caution, and nothing about this launch sets a deadline.

How big the browser audience is

The mobile app the extension is drawn from is large by Algorand standards: according to its Google Play listing, 500K+ downloads, a 4.6-star rating from 22.1K reviews, and an update on September 26, 2026. According to Apple's App Store listing, 7,954⁹ iOS ratings average 4.77. According to npmjs.org, @perawallet/connect was downloaded 10,239¹⁰ times in the last week and 63,466¹¹ times in the last month.

The two measures are not the same thing, since npm counts installs that include automated builds while Play counts lifetime downloads of an app. Read together, they suggest the browser side starts far smaller than the phone app, so the extension's footprint at launch is likely modest.

A reader who wants to test it can register at beta.perawallet.app¹ and wait for approval. When the zip arrives, the useful habit is the one the dashboard asks for: a fresh account holding small change, kept apart from whatever wallet holds savings. Builders who would rather not offer the extension at all can leave it out of the connect window with an option the SDK documents.